MSNBC makes a great case for HTML

This MSNBC story displays all the worst sins of Flash in news sites: useless animation for the sake of animation, long load times even on a high-speed connection, and crashing on a Macintosh. Then there’s their use of the word “interactive” as a noun to denote an interactive news story.
Couldn’t this story have been told better (and less expensively) using HTML?